China's Last Empire: The Great Qing pdf

William Rowe es un historiador social de la China moderna, en términos muy amplios, "social" y "moderna", cuyo trabajo se ha centrado también en la historia cultural, intelectual, económica y política. Sus dos primeros libros tratan de la historia del siglo XIX de una importante ciudad comercial del interior de China; El segundo recibió un premio impresionante de la Asociación de Historia Urbana y lo hizo participar en el debate sobre temas de "sociedad civil" y "esfera pública". También escribió libros sobre la conciencia de la élite gobernante de la dinastía Qing en el relativamente próspero siglo XVIII, y sobre los patrones de violencia agrícola en una provincia china devastada por la guerra habitualmente a lo largo de siete siglos. Recientemente, escribió una historia exegética general de la dinastía Qing, titulada El último imperio de China.

China's Last Empire: The Great Qing pdf por William T. Rowe

In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. The Great Qing was the second major Chinese empire ruled by foreigners. Three strong Manchu emperors worked diligently to secure an alliance with the conquered Ming gentry, though many of their social edicts—especially the requirement that ethnic Han men wear queues—were fiercely resisted. As advocates of a “universal” empire, Qing rulers also achieved an enormous expansion of the Chinese realm over the course of three centuries, including the conquest and incorporation of Turkic and Tibetan peoples in the west, vast migration into the southwest, and the colonization of Taiwan. Despite this geographic range and the accompanying social and economic complexity, the Qing ideal of “small government” worked well when outside threats were minimal. But the nineteenth-century Opium Wars forced China to become a player in a predatory international contest involving Western powers, while the devastating uprisings of the Taiping and Boxer rebellions signaled an urgent need for internal reform. Comprehensive state-mandated changes during the early twentieth century were not enough to hold back the nationalist tide of 1911, but they provided a new foundation for the Republican and Communist states that would follow. This original, thought-provoking history of China’s last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.